M57 Ring Nebula from Saturday at DSC

[The Thing]

First go at processing M57 from Saturday Nights imaging. The lights promise better than this cropped result shows but I am please to be able to see the central star. It has been slightly sharpened with the Refocus plugin for Gimp and I have used a 'real' unsharp mask process to tweak it a bit more. Not a patch on Marks.

13 of 15 x 120s. LX90 8", Konica Minolta Dynax 7D, Baader Alan Gee Mark II Telecompressor, PHD, DSSLive and DSS, lots of wires and laptops.

[JohnP]

Nice one Dunc - Well done - John

[MarkS]

Duncan,

That's much better than my first Ring Nebula and it's a good result for an unmodified camera.  If your guiding and polar alignment is good enough to push the exposure time to 5 minutes that will make a considerable difference.

Mark

[RobertM]

Nicely done Duncan, it's always going to be difficult pulling something out of the mirk with short exposures so you've done really well.

[Fay]

Very nice, Duncan, amazing for such short exposures

[The Thing]

Thanks all.

I found that longer exposures on such a bright subject ended up saturating the CCD and losing detail in the structure. It's an old DSLR (2001).